Prioritisation

The killer feature of productivity software and methods should be prioritisation rather than filing. We deal with such a large volume of inbound traffic in our digital lives, from social media to email to articles and videos from our favourite websites that we need systems to help us focus on the most important things first. Facebook already tries to show you what's most important on your Timeline, but as far as Facebook is concerned, Facebook is all there is. What we need is a way to draw absolutely everything in our lives, from all that digital stuff above to the actions and projects, movies, TV shows, books and so on into one inbound stream, or as few streams as possible. That makes the next step easier: figuring out what's most important out of everything.

This will always take some time. After all, there's always more stuff coming in, and you'll always have to deal with it. However, if you're dealing with the most important stuff first, and you know that it's properly organised, you'll know that everything is as good as it can get. There's no need to stress that you aren't dealing with the hundred and three things that came in this morning when thirty of them are company update fluff from upper-upper management and another thirty are a passive-aggressive "reply-all" war about no business of yours. This, to me, is a key of GTD. Consolidate your inboxes, your filing and your action lists, prioritise them properly and then just do the work. It gets really hard to do sometimes, but it's absolutely worth it.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I have too many digital inboxes that refuse to play nice.
PPS - One day, I'll figure out how to manage them better from a single interface.